Pardon My Body (2 page)

I stared. “Why, didn't you get there?”

“No—that's what I'm trying to tell you. Around five-thirty, when I was going to powder my nose, he called me up and said there was some unexpected business he had to deal with tonight and would I come out. The office car was to take me back in time to reach my maiden's bed before nasty tongues could wag. I was damned annoyed because I had other plans, but a job's a job—and this one pays off rather better than a lot of secretarial positions these days, so I said okay, I'd do it. I grabbed a notebook, a stack of pencils, paper, carbons and the emergency portable and went down to meet Lee Wesley, the regular driver who was to make the trip with me.

“Then I found he had been taken ill and rather than wait while they sent a hurry call for the spare man I decided to drive myself. Everything went fine—in fact, I was five minutes ahead of schedule when I passed this very inn an hour back. Then…”

She paused and let the tip of her right index finger play delicately up and down the bruise. She winced slightly and went on, “A big Oldsmobile bore down on me and suddenly swung broadside across the road. I stood on everything and came to with a jolt
that nearly pitched me through the front window. When I recovered, a tall, thin man with his hat pulled over his eyes and a muffler over his mouth was pulling the door open with one hand and pointing a gun with the other. Another man went round slashing every tire, even the spare, with a long knife.”

She shivered. “I tell you I was terrified. They shoved me into the Oldsmobile, started up and drove back the way I'd just come—heading for Port Chester. Then, about two miles past this inn, they suddenly slowed and the tall man opened the door and without a word pushed me head first into the road. That's how I came to be where you found me. And that's all I know. Funny, isn't it?”

“Lady,” I said, “what you have just told me is so damn funny you ought to sell it to a cartoonist or maybe hire it out for a soap opera…you
did
say it all happened, didn't you?”

“Just like that.”

“Any ideas?”

“Not one. It was all like I told you and I don't even begin to know what it means.”

Giuseppe brought the deep apple pie and the ice cream. While he served it I tried to think of something. I achieved another of my many failures. I began eating again instead.

“You'll love this,” I said. “It's…” I quit in midstream. Julia Casson wasn't eating. She had bared her small white teeth and her face wore the hardest and strangest look. Then it was gone. I followed her stare across the grill at the corner table where the sharp toughie and the oldster were sitting. Only the sharp boy wasn't sitting there any more. But the silver-haired bird was. Still with his chin sunk on his chest. Which was odd when you came to think about it. Why should a guy sit for a half-hour with his chin on his shirt front? I felt icy fingers playing an obbligato up and down my spine.

There was another look on Julia Casson's face. Strained, almost unbelieving. She said, with difficulty, “I…I know that man. It's Mr. Banningham's partner. Mr. Arnold Grierson…I didn't see him when he came in. There seems to be something…”

But I was out of my seat and moving across the floor. The two cocktail glasses were empty—but if Grierson had sunk his drink somebody must have bored a hole in him and poured it in. In fact somebody
had
bored a hole. I found that out when I thrust his chin up. The handle of a long-bladed Task Force dagger stuck out of his elegant shirt. The point was deep in his heart.

I knew now why Mr. Grierson had lost his pink-brick complexion.

I
WAS LYING IN BED THE
next morning watching a long diagonal shaft of sunlight which had found the solitary chink in the heavy window drapes. It threw a small zone of the green-and-gold bed covers into blazing relief against the blackness of the room. The hour was ten o'clock and I was wondering what breakfast before mid-afternoon was going to taste like.

Then I heard the outside door to the lounge swing inwards, thudding pads across the carpet—and in another second the bedroom door was open, electric lights were blazing and Detective-lieutenant O'Cassidy was leaning against the lintel surveying the scene with evident disapproval, his faded raincoat tied round his middle with a leather belt, an old snap-brim which hadn't snapped in five years pushed back on his lank black hair.

I tossed a half-empty package of Luckies across.
O'Cassidy lit one and dropped the match on the carpet. I winced.

“People,” I said slowly, “usually get the desk to phone up to see if I either can or will see them. If you get my meaning.”

“Yeah?” O'Cassidy seemed only faintly interested. He hung the cigarette from his mouth, walked across to the window, flung back the drapes, walked back to the door and switched off the lights. “In th' int-er-ests of economy,” he explained.

I slid both feet to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, filling my pipe.

“D'you smoke that thing if you wakes up in th' middle of th' night?” asked O'Cassidy interestedly.

“Sometimes.”

O'Cassidy used his thumbnail to push some of the breakfast he'd eaten two hours before out of his front teeth. He stood there, rocking slightly on his heels and toes, six feet tall, thin, pale, harassed-looking—and as tough a copper as they come. And if every man has his price, no big shot had ever found Desmond O'Cassidy's. He had that dark Celtic passion for a cause which in County Cork thirty years ago might have put him behind a barricade with his blazing eyes along a sniper's rifle. On the sidewalks of New York in 1950 it drove him to hunt all the men
without the law—and the men who tried to use the law to break it.

Killers, grafters, con men, pimps, prostitutes, racketeers, gangsters, bit time gambling caesars and small time sneak thieves—he hated them all. He lived in a trim suburban house with a buxom young Polish wife and five small sons who arrived as unfailingly as Christmas in the first five years of their marriage. He carried the collection Sundays at Mass. I liked O'Cassidy.

He quit rocking and drove both hands into his sagging raincoat pockets.

“There's a helluva lot of bridges in Manhattan,” he said.

“Twenty, according to the latest reports.” If he didn't want to come directly to the point I wasn't going to help him along.

O'Cassidy said, “A guy oughta watch th' bridges he crosses. Seems like he should know where they're heading for.”

I went on smoking. He decided to quit stalling. “First night you're off the beat you have to go shoving your nose into trouble, huh?”

I told him I was out having a dignified celebration dinner. Too bad a guy can't give himself a quiet evening without knife men moving in on the joint. I put down my pipe, went into the bathroom and
started lathering my face. “Come on in—you can sit on the toilet and tell me everything. Wonderful place for inspiring confidences. You ought to try that sometime down at headquarters instead of slugging suspects with a nightstick.”

O'Cassidy's eyes darkened. “You can quit that,” he said shortly.

I sent a small globule of shaving suds in his direction. He ducked it.

“Okay,” he said, “a Misther Arnold Grierson, who has a forty-nine percent interest in United Textile Distributors and is a big man in this very city, walks into a smart roadside inn for a dinner he could have got without charge at his buddy's home two or three miles away. All right, so we'll pass that. But he moves in with a young guy who looks like he might be a hood or maybe, for all I should know, a hired killer. In fact, he must be a killer on account of he suddenly slams a long-bladed dagger into th' poor old gentleman's heart right there in full view of the populace.

“And who is sittin' there with a front seat in the stalls but Misther Dale Bogard, th' guy who used to be a smart newspaperman? But does he see what goes? He does not. For Misther Bogard is gazing like a sick calf into the beeootiful eyes of the dame or doll or lady he has just saved from sumpin' or other.”

O'Cassidy spat disgustedly into the bath.

“All right, Cass,” I said, “so I don't see what happens. Okay—where do we go from there?”

O'Cassidy poured himself a drink of water. “Seems like Mr. Grierson don't have a face that's known around the Golden Peacock because he don't mean a thing to MacIlleney. But Miss Casson, she knows him—but, goddammit, she don't see him on account of she's too damn busy looking at the great he-man who's saved her from whatever it was. And while everybody's so busy they don't have no time to bother with murders, the job is done and the killer walks out without turning a hair.”

O'Cassidy crumpled up the paper cup and gave me a long unwinking stare. “I don't know where you fit into this set-up, Dale—but I'm telling you to watch your step. You ain't got no police card now—there isn't a patrolman on the beat who has to do a thing to help you out of a jam. From now on you're out on your own. I wouldn't tangle too deep if I was you…and keep outa th' police hair, will ya?”

He slouched through the door. I called, softly, “Who inherits Grierson's pile?”

O'Cassidy stopped in his tracks and turned slowly round. He said, “His widow. They don't have no children.”

“And the forty-nine percent share in the business?”

“According to the firm's setup it passes to the remaining partner, subject to a profit payment to the widow. Only male next-of-kin are in line to inherit control.”

I said, “Nice for Banningham, huh?”

O'Cassidy gave me a long, curious look. He said, in a flat, toneless voice, “Banningham died last night, too.”

“Damn!” I said, for the razor had slipped and a half-inch nick under my left ear was bleeding rapidly. I groped for the alum stick. “Say that again, slowly, Cass.”

He said it again. I couldn't think of a thing to lay my tongue to.

O'Cassidy grinned. “Ain't you a smart guy? You sit through a murder without even seeing it and when it's finally brought to your attention you don't even connect one guy with the other…”

“The state police took our preliminary statements and we motored back to New York,” I said shortly.

“Sure they did, but they start to get ideas. Ideas about why is Grierson way out in Connecticut when he lives on Long Island? So they puts through a call to Longwater Corners, where Banningham lives. And all they get is the old ‘No reply.' So they get to
thinking maybe sumpin' must be wrong. Hell, ain't there no hired help to answer the buzzer?”

O'Cassidy paused and tipped his hat so the sweatband was eased off his forehead. I could see the wide imprint on his pale skin.

“Captain Jenkins don't like the way things stack up, so he grabs off a police jalopy and a couple patrolmen and beats it up to Longwater. Th' whole damn place is in darkness and they finally have to bust their way in. No a soul in sight—until they get to the bedrooms and find Banningham stretched out on his with enough barbiturates to float th' Queen Elizabeth under his green silk pajamas.”

“Suicide?”

“Could be.”

“But you don't think so.”

O'Cassidy got out a cigarette paper and started rolling. Little strands of golden tobacco spilled on to the carpet. “I don't have an idea—except it's funny a rich old guy should want to bump himself off. Not forgetting that his own doctor say he don't have to take medicine to get his sleep.”

I tied a Windsor knot in the royal blue tie. “You figure there's more to it than meets the eye?”

“I don't know a thing,” said Cass. He added, slowly and deliberately, “But I will. And I don't want
no amateur private eye sticking his chin out. If you know anything outside of what you told the state police I'm here to listen.”

“I don't know a thing,” I mimicked. I gave him the good old steady look. “And if you're thinking of setting up as a private inquiry bureau you can forget it. I quit newspapers to start writing books and I don't want my time messed up by clue-hunting coppers, not even by old buddies like Desmond O'Cassidy.”

“Okay.” He pulled his hat back over his forehead. “You just stick to that, Dale, and everything'll be fine.”

Then he was gone.

I finished dressing and went down to breakfast. I think it was something special—but it might have been anything because I was too preoccupied to notice. I ate hurriedly and absent-mindedly. Then I went back to my tiny lounge, leafed through the 1,600 pages of the New York telephone directory. Maybe she wasn't listed on account of using a party line or something. But she was—Casson, Julia, 2168a West Portland Street and a number on the Queens exchange. I cradled the receiver on my shoulder so I could reach for a cigarette while I dialled. Then I suddenly remembered it was nearly eleven in the morning and that she'd most likely be
at her office. I dialled United Textile Distributors Inc., that old-established family business that hadn't got a family anymore.

The girl on the switch said, “Good morning. This is United Textile Distributors Incorporated.” Touch of olde worlde courtesy. Not perky departmental store with the overtones of Broadway.

I matched the mood. “I shall be grateful,” I said, “if you will be so good as to put me through to Miss Casson's office.”

Julia's voice spoke. Quite different now. No giggle. Strictly business. “Julia Casson speaking.”

“Do you know Detective-lieutenant Desmond O'Cassidy?” I asked.

“No.”

“You will,” I said.

“It would be wonderful,” said Miss Casson icily, “if I knew who
you
were first.”

I grinned. “I'm the guy who might put you in a book some of these days.”

“Oh!” There was a pause while she modulated into another key. “Come on up, big man.”

“I'm in my private lounge,” I said wickedly. “why don't you come here instead? It's quieter.”

I just caught the giggle. Then the business voice took over again. Dr. Jekyll was back. “I have work
to do. I can't run out of the office anytime I like to keep clandestine dates.”

“You relieve my apprehensions,” I said. “But about O'Cassidy.”

“Yes?”

“O'Cassidy is a very persistent policeman who will be calling on you any minute now.”

There was a tiny interval. When she spoke again her voice was more somber than I'd have thought possible.

“You mean…about Mr. Banningham.”

“Yeah.”

“We…we only heard when we came in this morning. It's…too dreadful.”

“It is.”

“I mean, both of them. Mr. Banningham's suicide happening almost at the same time as the…murder.”

“Somebody,” I said slowly, “must have had what looked like a good reason for planting a dagger into Grierson, and it could be that Banningham had a good reason for bumping himself off.”

“Mr. Banningham,” she said, “was a well-adjusted man—that's the jargon, isn't it? It seems incredible to us that he should do this thing.”

“It's my guess O'Cassidy has the same idea.”

She paused again, “Meaning exactly what?”

“Meaning he figures the case will stand a scrutiny
by the homicide bureau. Just that. Nothing more—or less. But I didn't call you up to tell you that.”

“No?”

I ground my half-smoked cigarette into the glass ashtray. Carefully, I said, “Look, Miss Casson—some guys stop your car. They rip open your beautiful white sidewall tires. They bundle you into another car and ditch you a few miles down the road. Now all this takes place at the very time you're on the way to Banningham's home. The guys who stop you aren't hoist men. They don't even take your handbag. It isn't an assault job because they don't take any interest in your honor. But they have to have some reason. Even the dumbest country copper can figure that one out without a slide-rule. And when he finds it coincides with the sad passing of Mr. Banningham he's liable to start asking questions.”

“You mean if Mr. Banningham was murdered the men who held me up were implicated.”

“It could be just like that.”

“That's what you meant about this Detective O'Cassidy coming to see me?”

“Not quite. There's something else.” I hesitated a moment, wondering how to phrase it so her panties didn't drop off in the panic. “Look,” I said earnestly. “I thought you were a smart girl. Can't you see that
the man who killed Banningham may be the same man who put that knife into Grierson—and that you sat there looking at him?”